THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE
Photograph by B. Anthony Stewart
ONE OF BRITAIN'S
"SAFETY VALVES" BLOWS OFF STEAM IN HYDE PARK
For years London crowds have flocked to hear soap-box orators in this open-air forum. On
taxes, tariffs, politics, religion, war, peace, work, wages, speech is free and no proper theme is
barred. Hecklers may heckle, but if speakers are molested, or abuse their privilege, watchful bobbies
gently intervene (page 12).
Historic Metropole Hotel served its last
supper the week I reached London. Sad
faced waiters closed its doors forever. Now
famous Adelphi Terrace is being torn down,
even as Hotel Cecil melted into scrap.
As ancient city landmarks fade, queer
modernistic structures, bewildering to Lon
doners returning after long absence, rise in
their place. Look at that big cube of metal
and glistening black glass which holds Lord
Beaverbrook's Daily Express in Fleet
Street (page 5); or the classic stone temple
of the British Broadcasting Corporation
(pages 27 and 32).
Or at Shell-Mex House on the Strand,
Bush House in Aldwych, and all the mon
ster new piles raised here as official
headquarters by Canada, Australia, South
Africa, and other members of the British
Commonwealth-whose show windows dis
play the products of these far-away lands.
They seem unreal, out of place, in this
long-static, smoke-stained, weather-beaten
old town.
Rise of new suburbs is no less aston
ishing.
"Satellite" towns, dormitories of
50,000 or more, spring up where yesterday
lay green fields and truck gardens. Smoky
forms of new factories rim the horizon.
Middlesex County, men say, will soon be
wholly urban. Steadily the city unfolds
down through Surrey. Southeast towards
the hop fields of Kent "ribbon towns"
sprawl beside the highways; in Essex and
Hertfordshire, "the scaffold poles of the
builder are like wands that conjure new
towns out of the ground" (page 50).
Drawn by this boom, industry tends to
shift here from the less prosperous North.
Workers flock along; each year London
adds a young city to its population, and
each day 100,000 visitors pass through its
streets. In one week, at Regent Palace
Hotel, 40 different nationalities filled out
the police form. Yet you see few idle men.
Munition works run day and night; 40,
000,000 gas masks are being made-even
every child is to have one; flying field
schools turn out more and more pilots.
To learn how London, growing so fast,
handles its passengers, I went to "London
Transport" headquarters, a system which
hauls a crowd each year equal to twice all
the tabulated people on earth.